PS on I-380

"Bypasses have got to be built."
And interstate highways have got to be widened.

Last week I considered the plan to widen Interstate 380 between North Liberty and Cedar Rapids from four to six lanes. I tried to construct the strongest argument for the project, based on increased population and daily traffic, as well as reasons not to do it (induced demand, fiscal stress at all levels of government, environmental costs, maybe traffic safety). I explained why I thought the reasons not to do it were stronger.

Despite a public meeting this week, we're still without specifics on the cost, or on the metrics that justify the expansion. We need to know: How much time are we buying with our X hundred million dollars, and whose time are we saving? Consider that this is a 12-mile stretch of highway, with a 70-mile-an-hour speed limit (though the design speed surely is higher). Driving either direction between Iowa City and Cedar Rapids, and assuming no obstructions, you should make it through this patch in about 10 minutes. In heavy traffic, that time will increase, but at what point do we say it's congestion? And how long does that "congestion" last--one hour a day?

Google Maps has a traffic function that allows the user to see where traffic is heavy, and how that affects travel times. So far, checking during morning and evening rush hours, I have yet to see heavy traffic on I-380, and travel times are always normal. You want to see congestion, check out I-290 west of Chicago.

So, when governments everywhere are financially stressed, infrastructure has been described as "crumbling" for a quarter-century, Iowa is closing schools and mental health centers and using contingency funds to balance the budget, is the I-380 "problem" that some politically-vocal drivers are annoyed when other drivers are doing 65 in a 70 zone--or 70 when they want to go 85--and they can't pass them? Politically-connected construction companies that need contracts? Politicians themselves who miss cutting ribbons? I hate to be sounding so cynical, but I'm just not getting any better explanation. 

What will happen when, after months of construction-related detours and delays, the highway is widened? Here are two scenarios.

Low induced demand (traffic stays around 54000 cars/day). Induced demand is not an intuitive concept. After all, as the ARTBA says on their websites, laying sewer pipe doesn't cause people to go to the bathroom more often! It is pretty exhaustively documented (see the earlier post), but usually in places like Los Angeles or Houston or London. Eastern Iowa is not highly-populated, and is not likely to be. So it could be the induced demand effect will be barely noticeable. Travel times will change marginally at most, and the driving experience won't be as much better as some people seem to think it will be. It will be, in short, a substantial expenditure of government money for nothing much in return. What we should have done instead: Nothing. Maybe fund schools and mental health.

High induced demand (traffic continues to increase, say to 72000-81000 cars/day). The appearance or expectation of a smoother ride might drive more people to live farther from work i.e. Ely, Fairfax, North Liberty, Shueyville, Solon, Swisher, or rural Linn or Johnson counties. This will help to fill up that third lane, so that in a few years traffic will be just as "bad" as it is now. On the other hand, it will also boost population and the tax rolls in those little towns and rural areas. They may well have a stake in facilitating commuters, and would expect to reap substantial benefits while bearing little of the costs. Here in D.C. there've been proposals floated to build a bullet train to Baltimore. There are a lot of unanswered questions about this, but the areas in between are wondering why they should provide land for a train that will favor these two major cities while bypassing them. What we should have done instead: Regional revenue sharing, (see also Liu and Arnosti 2018) and at least investigate passenger rail.

Whatever decision is made, and however it comes out, we should take collective actions for the right reasons. The Hamilton Project's recent study of infrastructure policy lists a number of standards for evaluating projects (2017: 2): economic return on investment (see also Marohn 2013 and 2016), economic vs. political considerations, rate of depreciation, cost of borrowing, where the money is coming from, and need for economic stimulus. By any of these standards, does widening I-380 pass the smell test?

OTHER READING:

Tod Litman, "Urban Sprawl Costs the American Economy More Than $1 Trillion Annually," LSE US Centre, 1 June 2015

Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, Ryan Nunn and Greg Nantz, "If You Build It: A Guide to the Economics of Infrastructure Investment," The Hamilton Project, February 2017

[P.S.: See also Dirk Vander Hart, "A New Report Shows Highway Widening Won't Solve Portland's Congestion Woes," Portland Mercury, 7 March 2018]

Letter from Washington (II)

I've made my first breakthrough as a (temporary) Washingtonian: I've learned to stop worrying and love the bus system.

I first met the Metro during my first visit to the city 34 years ago. It was a gleaming new transportation system then; now, it is showing the effects of age and possibly deferred maintenance. There've been a few widely-publicized incidents, such as a piece of ceiling falling at the Rhode Island Avenue station, which will be closed for maintenance this summer after the All-Star Game. This week one north-south track was closed for emergency maintenance, creating delays on the green and yellow lines.

I've encountered nothing harrowing on the Metro yet. I enjoy the advantages of trains: the network is simple and gets you around the city fairly quickly without having to deal with auto traffic. Washington's train network has six lines, named after colors, but they share routes so there really are three routes through the city: east-west (blue/orange/silver), north-south (green/yellow), and the red line, which follows a U-shaped route through the northern half of the city. We live half a mile from both Union Station (red) and Eastern Market (blue/orange/silver), so the trains are easy to get to. I prefer Eastern Market, because Columbus Circle by Union Station is difficult for pedestrians to navigate.

Once inside the station, you choose which train to take by the name of the station at the end of the line in the direction in which you're going. This takes practice; I can do it automatically in Chicago but am still learning Washington. Then just find your spot on the track and wait for a train to come. Electronic message boards tell you how long your wait will be, and in the meantime there's WiFi.

The bus system is by comparison a tangle of complexity. Washington, like most cities larger than Cedar Rapids, has many bus routes, so unless you take the same bus to the same place every day this can be mind-boggling. When Jane and I took a bus downtown a couple weeks ago, I think it was the first time I've ever taken a city bus in Washington. The advantages are stops are even closer, and you can see the city go by outside the window.

The key to making the bus system intelligible is the wealth of information available online. My phone's map function includes transit-based directions with the numbers. The DC Metro Transit ap allows me to see, updated in real time, when the next bus will arrive.

 

Now I use either bus or train, depending on convenience, speed and sometimes weather. I've trained to 1 Million Cups in McLean, Virginia--which ride set me back $5.75 due to congestion pricing. (The hordes of auto drivers who daily flood Tyson's Corners paid nothing extra.) I've bused downtown to a play at Ford's Theater. To get to American University I train downtown and then bus from there. (While bus-to-bus and train-to-train transfers are free, bus-to-train transfers get you 25 cents off.) Washingtonians make a relatively high percentage of daily trips by public transit. In spite of that, or perhaps because of that, driving times--at least as reported by my phone ap--are often shorter than transit times. I'd still rather ride, for a lot of reasons.

DC Streetcar at the Union Station stop (2nd and H Sts NE),
which is sort of near Union Station

Then there's the mysterious streetcar. Washington has a single streetcar line, which runs east-west along H Street NE for about 2.5 miles. Signs promise that this is merely the first line of a city-wide system "from beyond the Anacostia to the Georgetown waterfront." When I gave it a spin, it seemed serviceable if you happened to have some cause to be going its direction, and the cars were well-occupied both ways. Rides are free, at least "currently" according to another helpful sign. The tram moves on tracks in the street, along with the auto and bus traffic. We were stuck for awhile at one point because a guy in a parked car had his driver's side door open, blocking the track. H Street is a study in the gentrification process, particularly along the western half of the route, where toney restaurants exist next door to pawn shops, and head shops attract serious stoners who co-exist with grocery shoppers at Whole Foods and Giant. (See also Lurie 2016.)

SEE ALSO:
Laura Bliss, "How Seattle is Winning the War on the Car Commute," CityLab, 16 February 2018
Arian Horbovetz, "Transit Moves People, Not Money," Strong Towns, 14 February 2018
Jon Whitely, "Seattle and Honolulu Move Up the Ranks of the Best Cities for Public Transit in 2018," Redfin, 21 February 2018

The futility of widening (II)

Discussion is going forward on widening Interstate 380 between North Liberty and Cedar Rapids, so that there are three lanes in each direction the whole way. Things are getting realer: The Iowa Department of Transportation will hold a public information meeting next Tuesday, February 20, at the District 6 office, 5455 Kirkwood Boulevard SW, Cedar Rapids, from 5:00 to 6:30 p.m.

As I wrote two years ago, the impetus for widening the highway is understandable: population in Linn and Johnson counties has increased: their combined population in the 2016 census estimate is 368,208, up 7.63 percent since 2010 and 39.0 percent since 1990, both faster than the United States as a whole Intercity commuting has increased with population--average daily traffic counts at the county line increased by about 50 percent between 1998 (38,200) and 2014 (55,600)--and drivers can at times feel trapped in traffic without an extra lane to set them free. The region and the state have sunk their investments into highway transportation, and citizens seem to approve; it’s easier to build on that than to try to create alternatives from nothing.

I-380 is a spur from I-80 west of Iowa City,
bending at Cedar Rapids towards Waterloo

The arguments against the project remain as strong as they did two years ago. First, widening the highway does not merely set existing traffic free. It encourages more traffic along the highway. Increased highway capacity encourages more people to commute and existing commuters to drive more. This has been shown in any number of studies. Here are some cited by Tom Vanderbilt (Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us), Knopf, 2008) and Edward Humes (Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation, Harper, 2016):

• ·         2002 study of projects in England: most of the time the increase in traffic on alternative routes was nowhere near the traffic “lost” on the affected roads (S. Cairns, S. Atkins and P. Goodwin, “Disappearing Traffic? The Story So Far,” Municipal Engineer 151:1 (March 2002), 13-22
• ·         A 2011 project to widen a ten mile stretch of I-405 in Los Angeles from ten lanes to twelve cost $1.3 billion and resulted in (slightly) slower travel times once completed (“$1.1 Billion and Five Years Later, The 405 Congestion Relief Project Is a Fail,” Los Angeles Weekly, 4 March 2015)
• ·         Houston’s $2.8 billion Katy Freeway project widened I-10 from eight lanes to 26 lengthened travel times (Humes 142)
• ·         Braess Paradox: Adding a new road to a transportation network may actually slow things down for all its users, because “user optimal” is not “system optimal” (Dietrich Braess, “On a Paradox of Traffic Planning,” Transportation Science 39 (2005): 446-450
• ·         Nb Vanderbilt based on experience of London (and before that Disneyland) recommends congestion pricing as the solution to traffic congestion (Vanderbilt 2008: 175)… though it’s not clear to me what congestion means in an Iowa context 

More driving is, pure and simple, bad for the environment, which is, let us recall, what we are all living in, breathing and drinking. Not only does auto exhaust pollute the air (Stone 2008), the carbon emissions contribute to climate change (Bereitschaft and Debbage 2013), which is far enough along that it ought at least to bother people. Though Eastern Iowa is not Houston, sprawl also has a negative effect on animals and plants (cf. Weller 2018).

Secondly, in the current fiscal environment the costs of widening the highway alone are unconscionable, without even bringing opportunity costs to bear. The American Road and Transportation Builders Association estimates the cost to widen a highway from four lanes to six at $4 million per mile, which would make the total project cost $40 million. Even if this were on the nose, which I'm doubting, this is a transfer of funds from non-commuters to commuters. Even if the money were there, is this really the best use of it? The State of Iowa has been cutting mental health spending, and is increasing K-12 education below inflation, choices forced by its fiscal crisis. The national government, which for the time being remains a substantial source of state highway funds, just passed $500 million in spending on top of a $1.5 billion tax cut, which will aggravate its own fiscal crisis. Our nation’s infrastructure is crumbling, we’ve been hearing repeatedly for three decades, so we’re building more?

After the highway is built, and development follows, it falls to city and county governments to follow up with streets, pipes, and year-to-year maintenance. It falls to school districts to get these farther-flung children to school. None of these governments are flush, either. It hardly behooves them to spread their responsibilities farther.

Finally, while the idea that more highway capacity will relieve congestion and improve safety has intuitive appeal, in practice these hopes are generally blasted. Besides the induced demand studies, cited above, there is evidence that wider roads do not improve safety, either because more open lanes encourage higher driving speeds or because induced demand eventually restores the former level of traffic density. “If you build a road that’s wide, has a lot of sight distance, has a large median, large shoulders, and the driver feels safe, they’re going to go fast,” says Tom Granda, a psychologist employed by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). “It doesn’t matter what speed or sign you have. In fact, the engineers who built that road seduced the driver to go that fast” (Vanderbilt 2008: 183).

My guess is that safety on a six-lane highway would either be a push or a slight decline. (Stroads present many more safety issues than even high-speed highways.) Interstate highways are engineered for speed and safety. I would caution that more open road means higher speeds, and that more lanes means more jockeying, at least in rush hour.

One more note: In the medium-term, should further capacity be needed, it’s much easier to scale up public transit by adding more bus and train runs than it is to build still more highway lanes.

Too many marching in for the current number of lanes?

SEE ALSO: 

Jonathan Coppage, "Our Infrastructure Inefficiency," National Review, 19 February 2018

Joe Cortright, "Questioning Congestion Costs," City Observatory

The budget deal and the future of Congress

"Political Drama" by Robert Delaunay (1885-1941)
at the National Gallery of Art, Washington

There's a positive tone in town right now, thanks to the budget deal worked out by the Senate Republican and Democratic leaders that not only prevents another shutdown, but funds the government through March 23, which makes it that much longer before we have to endure more brinksmanship. National defense, the Children's Health Insurance Program, disaster relief and the opioid epidemic get two years of funding.

It's not a great deal, being pretty much a logroll that provides additional spending for both parties' priorities. This will, of course, further aggravate the budget outlook already set askew by an irresponsible tax bill in December. The budget deal adds to the Keynesian stimulus begun by the tax cut, at a time when stimulus is clearly not indicated, and stock markets took another dive Thursday. Representative Dave Brat (R-VA), a member of the Freedom Caucus, is perfectly correct to call it a "Christmas tree on steroids" (Sullivan and Lee 2018). On the other hand, given the Freedom Caucus's enthusiasm for that tax cut, it could be taken as sour grapes that they weren't going to get their way on everything.

It's no news to you that Congress hasn't been impressing anyone for quite awhile. After a brief blip up into the 20s last winter, public approval ratings have settled back to the 15-20 percent range where they've been for nearly a decade. Congress as a group has rarely been wildly popular, but it's important to remember that the current numbers are low by historical standards, at least for the 75 years of national public opinion surveys.

My read on the quagmire at our nation's Capitol, previously explored in a number of posts listed below, is rooted in incentive structures. Ideological polarization and geographic sorting mean that neither Democratic nor Republican legislators have much incentive to seek constructive solutions to public problems. Core partisans are suspicious of bipartisan solutions, and there aren't enough swing voters in enough states and districts to counteract that. Accurate representation of their constituents gets them re-elected, but it also tends to stalemate or at best zero-sum solutions.

Ian Shapiro (from yale.edu)

So I was intrigued earlier this week to hear Ira Shapiro, a scholar and author as well as president of Ira Shapiro Global Straegies, LLC, highlight the importance of leadership at a forum celebrating the release of his new book, Broken: Can the Senate Save Itself and the Country (Brookings, 2018). He argues the decline of the Senate as a deliberative body is decades old, but suddenly accelerated in the middle of the last decade. "It's no accident," he said, "that the accelerating downward spiral of the Senate coincided with Mitch McConnell's time as leader." Senator Harry Reid (D-NV), Democratic leader from 2005-2017, was no prize, either: "Their joint legacy would be a broken Senate."

Source: flickr.com

McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, became the party's Senate leader in 2007, and Senate majority leader after Republican successes in the 2014 elections finally recaptured control of the chamber late in the Obama administration. Shapiro gave three examples of McConnell's norm-busting, counter-productive leadership style:

• After helping pass economic stimulus in fall 2008 when George W. Bush was still President, he "suddenly became against everything" once Barack Obama was inaugurated. Was he more concerned about how Obama's approval rating might affect Republican electoral fortunes than he was about the economy?
• His 2016 refusal to consider anyone Obama nominated to the Supreme Court after Justice Scalia died
• The unproductive handling of health care repeal in 2017

Shapiro clearly sees leadership style as a key causal variable in the current state of Congress. He concluded by pronouncing himself optimistic, anticipating the day when the 75 or 80 Senators "who know what the Senate is supposed to be and hate what it is now" step forward and "actually put country first."

Shapiro was joined on the panel by Molly Reynolds, a fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings, and author of Exceptions to the Rule: The Politics of Filibuster Management in the U.S. Senate (Brookings, 2017). She presented the evidence for the causal role of institutional incentives, in which senators' and voters' "ideological positions make it much more difficult to work collaboratively." Morover, partisan competition for control has increased since the era (1960s & 70s) that Shapiro used as his baseline for Senate performance. As a result, we see both parties staking out ideological positions, and using Senate procedures to thwart the other side, eschewing compromise in favor of "getting [or trying to get] policy done that is close to their own ideological positions." Individual senators, too, use procedures--like holds, which used to be rare but now are as common as dirt--to enhance their own reputations. There've always been such individuals--Wayne Morse and Jesse Helms leap to mind--but there are many more of them. Kentucky Senator Rand Paul's mini-filibuster Friday morning is only the most recent example. Reynolds shares Shapiro's discontent with the current state of the Senate, but concluded with a question rather than a hopeful statement: "How do we work within the existing set of incentives to change behavior?"

A third view, identified with political scientists like Morris Fiorina, is that partisan polarization among the electorate was created and manipulated by elites (see also Zingher 2018 and his co-authored article with Michael Flynn in the British Journal of Political Science). If polarized politics resulted from choices, can elites choose to move past it? Or, as I gloomily suspect, is this monster going to be harder to destroy than it was to create?

The panel was organized and hosted by William Galston, Ezra K. Zilkha chair and senior fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings. I once appeared on a panel with Galston, in 2009, which makes me feel one degree of separation from something.

VIDEO of the event is here: https://youtu.be/zB8XZrGxqoU 

SEE ALSO:
"Shutdowns and Sillypants (and the Statler Brothers)," 8 October 2013
"Deliberation and the Shutdown," 3 October 2013
"What's the Matter with Congress," 30 May 2013

Letter from Washington (I)

This semester my wife Jane and I are living in Washington, D.C., thanks to a generous sabbatical leave granted by my employer, Coe College. I am teaching one course for the Capitol Hill Internship Program, but mainly doing my own research and writing, most of which will land first in this electronic space. My top priority will be the urban immersion, experiential research into life in a major urban area. I grew up in the Chicago suburbs, but I've never lived in a city proper larger than Cedar Rapids (pop. 131,127), so being here (pop. 693,972) for more than a few days will be a new experience for me.

Houses tend to be of older construction, though not 180 years in most cases

We've been here a week. We're living in the basement apartment of a home in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, three blocks east of the Supreme Court building. I like it a lot so far, although it's not quite real life: I don't have full-time employment obligations, and while the rent is certainly extremely impressive by Iowa standards, I've got it covered for the spring, so I don't really have a good sense of how this situation would work financially if I were going to be here for the rest of time. So my positive reactions are not entirely grounded in practical day-to-day concerns.

Our block

With that disclaimer out of the way, the most impressive aspects of this neighborhood are the walkability--Walk Score is 91--and the neighborliness. Most of this area consists of older row housing, and there seem to be any number of basement apartments like ours. The density supports most major services within an easy walk: grocery stores (both full service and corner stores), pharmacies, cleaners, hardware stores, schools, parks, an indoor pool, two branch libraries, and nine or ten churches. Streets are narrow with frequent stops, and crosswalks highlighted. We're half a mile from two rapid transit stops. As a result, people walk. Any time I'm out, there are parents walking with small children, older children on their own, people walking dogs, people going to work or running errands. A lot of people walk because for most errands it's the easiest option. My phone has a step counter which I now check daily because I almost always get 12,000 or more steps (though not even half that Sunday when it was pouring rain most of the time).

I meet a lot of people as I walk, and most exchange greetings. I am not used to this--I'm used to the few people I encounter avoiding eye contact--but I like it. Driving, at least in this neighborhood, tends not to be aggressive, and drivers seem willing to yield to pedestrians crossing the street. I attribute this to the expectation that people will be walking or biking, a perception which requires some critical mass to develop.

But watch out for bicycles. In contrast to the neighborhood auto drivers there is more aggressive cycling than I'm used to. I reject stereotyping, or any overbroad claim that says "All X are Y," but it's happened often enough that I've come to anticipate it.

Brick sidewalks are generously wide but spawn hazards

There is, unquestionably, a lot of money in this neighborhood. I heard cited today the figure $103,000 for median family income in Capitol Hill, which would be almost double the national figure. I wonder how much the residents of the basement apartments might keep that figure from going even higher? But there's a lot of money in a lot of neighborhoods in the United States. What's notable about this bunch is they've chosen to live in close proximity to each other, to support public facilities and places, and to treat each other well. It's a good place to be.

Small business and the ideological divide

Eric Dinger of Lincoln, Nebraska, CEO and Co-Founder of Powderhook

Small businesses are essential to the future of the American economy and American towns, agreed a panel convened by the Bipartisan Policy Center Tuesday morning. Small businesses account for more than half of national job growth, but have seen their formation decline for decades and experience continually difficult access to financing.

Beyond agreement on those points, however, participants, particularly the two members of Conress who served as keynote speakers, painted two quite different pictures of the universe in which small businesses operate. I would have liked to have seen more efforts to reconcile those pictures; the ability to do so will be critical to future policy choices, not to mention the center's own report on this issue, due out later this year.

Sen Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH)

Jeanne Shaheen, a New Hampshire Democrat and ranking member on the Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee, described structural disadvantages faced by small businesses relative to large businesses. The Small Business Administration, which her committee oversees, is in this view critical to leveling the playing field, particularly when it comes to loans. She noted small business lending has decreased 13 percent since 2008 while lending to large businesses has increased, and blamed the consolidation of commercial banks, automated application processes and compliance burdens. Other ways governments can help small businesses solve problems include worker shortages (e.g. H1B and H2B visas for skilled immigrants), access to international markets (the Export-Import Bank), access to high-speed internet and in some places even cellular service, access to federal contracting and the special challenges faced by female- and minority-owned small businesses. She argued small businesses in particular suffer from the week-to-week funding of the federal government, which creates dangerous levels of uncertainty. When government gets its act together, it can be a vital source of support for small business creation and expansion.

Rep Blake Luetkemeyer (R-MO)

Blaine Luetkemeyer, a Missouri Republican and vice chair of the House Small Business Committee, described small businesses as innocent victims of governmental overreach, particularly an "onslaught" of regulations over the past few years. While arguing the problem was accumulation of multiple compliance requirements rather than any individual policy, he singled out for special mention the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank financial regulation, the latter of which has resulted in the loss of one small bank or credit union per day. All this government had businesses "hunkering down," not even trying to get credit due to the uncertain return-on-investment. But... victims no more! The regulatory rollback and tax cuts produced in 2017 has "smiles on their faces." With the heavy hand of government removed, small businesses are reinvesting into their communities, good times are ahead, and investment from abroad is sure to follow.

Reconciling disparate policies isn't necessarily impossible. One surely could see a constructive role for the SBA while at the same time, in the words of former FirstMerit Corporation CEO Paul Greig, "tailoring" federal regulation Dodd-Frank regulation of banks "to risk, size and complexity." It's harder to reconcile antithetical visions of government and the private marketplace, particularly when those visions also implicate assessment of the current presidential administration and thus the political fortunes of the parties. (Luetkemeyer's rosy outlook for small businesses was echoed that night in President Trump's State of the Union address.) If we "view all economic policy discussions through a small business lens," as former Senator Olympia Snowe suggested, can that encompass recognizing both burdens of taxes and regulations on small business as well as entrepreneurs' needs for the social goods those taxes and regulations are intended to promote? Unfortunately, both keynote speakers faced pressing business and departed without addressing the points the other raised.

Interestingly, neither keynoter suggested a third possiblity, that policies of governments at all levels significantly place locally-owned small businesses at a disadvantage (see, for example, Henninger 2017 on the effects of transportation funding).

Another interesting theme of the discussion was the equation by some panelists of small businesses with small towns. Main Streets exist in every community, of course, from the tiny South Dakota town that produced entrepreneur Eric Dinger all the way up to New York City. So do small businesses. How far do we want government to go in facilitating--guaranteeing?--the existence of every town in America? Is there a metric for what help (broadband? venture capital?) should be extended?

SOURCE: "Main Street Finance: How Can the Financial System Better Serve Entrepreneurs and Small Businesses," Bipartisan Policy Center, 14 December 2017

SEE ALSO: "Community Allies: The Virtue of Locally-Owned Businesses," 29 October 2016